Ohh!!! YESSS

Hi! It's me, Bennett! It's been a long time since I saw you in Mondstadt. I heard you went to Snezhnaya. You have to tell me what's it like. Is it as cold as what everyone says?

A lot of things happened since you left.

My bad luck is the same as ever. But I think it's infecting to other people, because Sir Kaeya seems to be more down lately.

Training has been slow lately. Not that I been slacking off or anything! It's just, lately Sir Kaeya doesn't seem to be in the mood to teach me. At first, he kinda let me do my own training while he supervises instead of teaching me new moves. But then he started to miss some trainings, and then one day, he just stop going altogether!

I thought he was sick or something, so I asked some of the knights. They said that he wasn't sick and that he just went to tavern more frequently.

I'm not allowed to go check up on him since I'm not old enough to go inside the tavern. I'm really worried about him.

If you have the time, can you come visit Mondstadt to check up on him? Please?

From,

Bennett

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I kinda have up trying to keep track on how many letters I sent lol

Omg hi Bennett sweetie! I miss you so much!

Yes! Snezhnaya is very cold, but I actually kinda like it! My lovely Childe knows the best ways to keep warm! ☺️

What a cruddy teacher you have! 😤 why don’t you join me and Childe! I bet he would love to teach you a thing or two! He’s a suuuuuper sweet guy and he loves kids! You would have a blast! No need to worry about your bad luck when you’re with us; Childe loves any sort of challenge!

Make sure to stay out of the taverns, okay Benny? There can be some dangerous people in there, and as much as I hate bringing up your bad luck…well, I shouldn’t have to say anything more, right?😂

I hope I can see you soon Benny! I miss you! Say hi to your dads and Razor for me, okay?

Benjamin introduces himself to his neighbour, who, for some reason, doesn’t even have wallpaper on his walls.

Owwww.

Here we are at the “consequences of not really doing what Garth advised in 8.06 and actually listening to each other.”

So Sam, Mr. “I have been upfront with you this whole time and you’ve done nothing but lie and keep secrets”, has been keeping a pretty big secret from Dean. He put Mostly Okay Martin on Benny surveillance detail. And HOOOBOY. For some reason, after having worked with Martin literally ONCE in his adult life, while Martin was voluntarily committed to an insane asylum because he cracked from the stress of hunting, for some reason Sam thought HE was more trustworthy than Dean.

Nice.

DEAN: [pause] You put "mostly okay" Martin on Benny? What is "mostly okay" doing hunting at all? SAM: Not hunting, Dean – tracking. Observe and report only. I was crystal clear about that. DEAN: Wow. I can't believe that. SAM: Really, Dean? You don't believe that? Because Benny's a vampire. And any hunter worth his salt isn't gonna let one just walk around freely. So I had Martin keep tabs on him. And right now, it's looking like I made the right call. DEAN: So Martin's saying Benny did this? SAM: Yeah. DEAN: [pause] Okay. SAM: Okay? DEAN: If Benny's in Louisiana draining folks... we should look into it.

And Dean’s ready to do what’s necessary, *IF* it’s actually Benny. 

Sam absolutely did not make the right call here, because it wasn’t actually Benny. But he wouldn’t believe Dean. He tried, he gave him a little leeway to investigate, but Sam refused to keep believing after a certain point. He chose to believe Martin, instead, despite not really trusting the guy to be hunting.

MARTIN: You're joking, right? We're doing this as soon as he pulls away. SAM: No, we're not, Martin. We're gonna give him a little bit of time. MARTIN: Hey, it's your brother. It's your call. How long are you gonna let him go on like this? It's staring him right in the face. SAM: [exhales sharply] Well, sometimes it's not easy to see things for what they are.

GAH. I hate this about Sam. He roots himself so deeply in his own beliefs (like back in s7 about Dean believing they were being haunted by Bobby but Sam dismissed it over and over until Bobby managed to materialize for them and proved Dean had been right all along, or like making Dean promise to go to Lisa because Dean had always wanted a normal life, or like believing Dean was “weak” all through s4). And it’s rearing its ugly head again here, and again, Sam spends this episode refusing to listen. While Dean goes out and deals with Objective Reality, finding the ACTUAL vampire doing the killing, and takes care of it WITH Benny. I mean... Benny is literally the one who kills the vampire responsible for the deaths, saving Dean’s life (again!) in the process. But Sam absolutely refuses to even HEAR the truth.

Because in order to keep Sam from going after the WRONG vampire, Dean resorts to a dirty trick, faking a text from Amelia that has Sam literally dropping everything (including Mostly Okay Martin) and driving off to Texas.

Now think, Sam was paired with Martin throughout this episode, who literally DIES because of his single-minded insistence that Benny should die, that no vampire is innocent. And he’s just... awful... 

BENNY: Oh, please. The half-wit who found me at the café? I'll take my chances with him. DEAN: That half-wit was sent by my brother, and trust me – my brother's not someone you want to mess with. BENNY: I don't have time to worry about them, Dean. I didn't think Desmond had an ounce of steel in his spine, but I was wrong about that. So now I'm gonna do what I should have done two days ago, which is put him back where he belongs. DEAN: You know there's only one way to do that, right? And that is for you to sit on the sideline while I convince Sam and Martin to go after Desmond. They see you out there, they don't care if you're gonna be collecting for the March of Dimes. They are gonna slice first and ask questions later. You know that. BENNY: You really think they'll go for that?

Spoiler alert: They did not go for that.

Mostly, Martin didn’t, revealing even more about himself (and disturbingly, his knowledge of John):

MARTIN: Glad your dad wasn't around to hear that. He'd have a mind to take you both out the woodshed and show you what's what. Half inclined to do it myself. SAM pushes MARTIN against a wall. SAM: You listen to me. I brought you into this. I can bring you out just as easy. So the only thing you're gonna be inclined to do is shut up and follow my lead.

YiKES.

But of course even after Sam gets the false call for help and runs off in fear for Amelia’s safety, he abandons Martin on the roadside, now suddenly unleashed to “take care of things” the way he believes they should’ve been. Dean tells him the vampire is dead, it was not Benny, and to walk away. But instead of that, he forces Benny back by taking Elizabeth hostage and threatening to kill her (A COMPLETE INNOCENT HUMAN) if Benny doesn’t come back. Not only did Martin want to kill Benny, he wanted to torture him AND Elizabeth with the fact that he was a vampire. And just... *ewwww*.

So... Benny kills Martin, and Elizabeth tells Dean exactly what happened. Sam refuses to hear the truth, because GAH. Sam had set Mostly Okay Martin on surveillance duty on Benny, and Dean had programmed Amelia’s number into a burner phone. They both lied to each other, both tried to manipulate each other through the people they attached themselves to during the Purgatory Year. Except Sam’s was always founded on a lie. He never told Amelia the truth, so she was always a self-deception, an “escapist fantasy” that he addressed in 8.08, and yet... because of who he is, and how he thinks, he cannot grasp that Dean’s association with Benny was founded on absolute truth between them. Remember that whole conversation about trusting people when they first met in Purgatory? The only reason Dean trusts him NOW is because BENNY REALLY NEVER BROKE HIS TRUST. PERIOD. Their entire friendship is founded on that fact. And Sam can’t even conceptualize that sort of trust, because he’d spent the entire past year actively running away from it.